Kissed by - Softcover

Chasin, Alexandra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573661384 ISBN 13: 9781573661386

Publisher: University of Alabama Press, 2007

Synopsis

This work is a collection of innovation fictions that range widely in form and style. Alexandra Chasin's remarkable stories employ forms as diverse as cryptograms (in ""ELENA=AGAIN"") and sentence diagrams (in ""Toward a Grammar of Guilt"") to display her interest in fiction as a form constituted by print on the page, every bit as much as poetry. In ""They Come From Mars,"" the words are arrayed on the page like troops, embodying the xenophobic image of invading armies of immigrants and illegal aliens that animates the narrative. One story incorporates personal ads (""Lynette, Your Uniqueness""), another is organized alphabetically (""2 Alphabets""), while another leaves sentences unfinished (""Composer and I""). A number of stories take metafictional turns, calling attention to the process of writing itself. The last piece in the collection plays with genre distinctions, including an index of first lines and a general index. Set in New York, New England, Paris, and Morocco, these tales are narrated by men and women, old and young, gay, straight, and bisexual; one narrator is not a person at all, but a work of art. Each of these deft, playful, and sometimes anarchic fictions is different from the others, yet all are the unmistakable offspring of the same wildly inventive imagination.

About this title

About the Author

Alexandra Chasin has taught literary, cultural, and gender studies at Boston College, Yale University, the University of Geneva, and Columbia University. She is the author of Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market. Her fiction has appeared in AGNI, Chain, sleeping fish, West Branch, Phoebe, The Capilano Review, and online in Exquisite Corpse, DIAGRAM, and elimae. A past recipient of a Bunting Fellowship and a Whiting Fellowship, Chasin now teaches in the Writing Department at Lang College, The New School. Kissed By is her first book of fiction.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

KISSED BY

By ALEXANDRA CHASIN

FC2

Copyright © 2007 Alexandra Chasin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-138-6

Contents

Kissed By..........................................................15The Mystery of Which Mystery.......................................23Lynette, Your Uniqueness...........................................45ELENA=AGAIN........................................................47Round-Trip Blues...................................................63Potatoes, You Ask..................................................65all kinds of people on the Q train.................................69B. & G. & I........................................................81Two Alphabets......................................................99Kant Get Enough....................................................103Why I'm Jealous....................................................111Who Writes This Shit?!.............................................115Composer and I.....................................................135They Come From Mars................................................139Please Compose Your Photographs More Carefully.....................145So What Elapses?...................................................147Toward a Grammar of Guilt..........................................163Seven Indexes

Chapter One

Kissed By

I began as we all do, by wanting something, but I hardly knew what. I began by wanting somebody, nobody, everybody to know that I wanted something, but I hardly knew which. I considered all the others that had ever been drawn or withdrawn from life, like me. There was, among them, a little bird. It flew around the inside of an airport. Elsewhere, even farther from the frame, there was an alcoholic white woman waiting for a wedding ceremony to end. There was one first kiss, or should I say two? How many kisses are there in a first kiss?

I began as all we sketches do by wanting something or someone made up. But there's no such thing.

I was begun by an artist so abstract or minimalist or simply wrong-minded that I HAVE NO FACE.

In the beginning, I wanted to be by a painter who has three easels going at once, each on another wall, like Roz in her studio in the Bowery with one small pastel and two big paintings in various stages of existence so that when she comes to the temporary end of one of the oils, when in her mind its maroon of the moment has been exhausted, she can turn to the right, pick up the pastel fresh and apply the curves she just began to know it needed when she was up to her wrists in red a minute before and a quarter-turn ago.

Like the witch in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, who stirs all four pots at once, one with each limb. But constantly. Can you see her now, wooden spoons with long handles, handles tied with rags to her forearms and shins, two rags around each stirring part, wound double tight? Head drooping with fatigue, straw hanging wearily from her pointy noggin, oh so tired, still she stirs.

Like Moira Shearer trapped in The Red Shoes whose bad magic consists in compelling their wearer to dance. But forever. Ceaseless pirouette, vertiginous arabesque. A night, a spinning fortnight, an unearthly long time, until she dances down to the station, out on the tracks, and under a train.

So I turned to my scarlet artist and begged and begged for words and birds and weddings. Unbelievably, she agreed to a few strokes. But she is a brute and leaves me faceless. She gives me leave to stray because I'm not too hard to find. She lets me drive a car, but when I pull up at a stoplight, the drivers in the cars stopped around me look away or look again with horror. If she's not careful, I will cause an accident and if she is careful, I will cause an accident. And when and when and how and how will I ever get my kiss?

I might take an epic journey which I might begin by stumbling through Gate 22 and onto a flight to a faraway place to watch my sister follow a pink flower child down the aisle and into the curving arms of a fearsome man. I might see my mother lurch to the dance floor to do the Funky Tradition, hours after I do has been said and seconds after my sister has taken her last happy twirl. I might spirit away the flower child and we might head eternally for the tangerine on the horizon as it eludes us west and west again.

But that would be an easy out-too watercolor, too insipid for my painter. She would have me faceless fodder. She is terrible.

I begged again for the concrete. She taunted me: Wood a paintbrush do, souring in turpentine? Wood a very long-handled spoon?

Wood this unfinished block at the tip of toe shoes do? Wood you rather your sister walked some pirate plank and fell into the Dead Red Sea? She laughs while I rack up splinters in my unfisted hands.

So I dropped by Roz's studio, hunched like the headless horseman to protect the fine-feathered figure in the lobby. I rang once, I rang twice. Either Roz had the music up too high or she had herself up too high. Or maybe she was home in bed kissing as long as she knew it would take the vermilion of the day before to dry. What is the color of one Roz kissing.

What are two weeks spent spilling out of ruby slippers as against a lifetime of sneaking around without a face? Why can't I hot-air-balloon it out of town instead of facing: the earnest east, its early-to-bed-early-to-rise philosophy of life; the music without mercy; the plain fact that a griddle can spit better than I can? Why does she paint me into the corner of complaint, smiling all the while? She, she has and does and says it all.

About all I can really say for myself ? Caucasian. Beyond that, it's a blur. All I can really say is, it hurts, but not in my eyes or nose or mouth. All I can say is, I could go on forever. All I can finally say is, I would throw myself under the crimson canvas for just two plummy kisses.

Chapter Two

The Mystery of Which Mystery

Some elements I want in my story:

I would like seduction without commitment; dubious intentions; groundless, but nonetheless debilitating, doubt. Of course, they've been done before.

I'm considering children separated from their parents, having been abandoned, abducted, left temporarily in someone's care, or having wandered away-in any event, the parent, the pivot point of consciousness, somehow suddenly gone.

I'm thinking of Leo, thinking of Lise. Maybe you'd like to know what I think they think.

I'll need the laundromat, the department store, the riverbank, the amusement park, the bus terminal, and maybe the train station, places where grownups can vanish. Watch with me while Leo wonders, as he has done so many times before, why his mother picked the laundromat, of all places, to take off from. The one of the above that most seems to promise a return. When the coins are spent and the cycle done. A blue whale is beached on the wall. Why did she work it out so that Leo would spend forty-five minutes without any doubt that she would come back to put the clothes in the dryer, without the slightest hint that she might not be back to scoop them, warm and dry, another hour after that, into the big canvas sack, to take them, and him, home together? In retrospect, Leo thanks her for those forty-five minutes. At the time, Leo put the wet wash in the dryer by himself, and fed it money, still without wondering. The blue whale blew bubbles. In retrospect, Leo can see that it was strange that she had left him three quarters, as though she meant to leave him with something, at least-enough money to take the bus across town, or enough clean clothes for a week, but not both. She didn't usually leave him with change, so Leo might have known, if he'd been paying more attention, that something was off. But because he did not know, he dried the clothes, and when he had waited long enough and the wash had set into wrinkles in the sack, Leo had no choice but to walk.

I want lovers, true lovers and false lovers and true/false lovers and too true/too false lovers, with other lovers of their own. Like when the only color in the scene on a midwinter midafternoon, which is otherwise white with snow, and dark with mud and clouds and lack of sun, when the only color at all is the naked brown of the trunk of a tree in the park. The wet-from-snow-melt rich dark earth brown, wearing the hard skin of a tree. Love that tells a story, saying that nut-bark brown is the very color of her hair. Love that true and false.

Don't you want lovers too?

I'd really get off on a missing hand, but I saw that in a play by Suzan-Lori Parks, so I can't use that.

I need mystery, I think. Not where Leo walked to, with his clothes in a sack, not that mystery. Not why his mother disappeared, not that mystery. Not love, that mystery.

Leo is older now, and now he has a girlfriend, Lise, whom he loves with all of his tattered heart. He passes by the old laundromat where the blue whale's bubbles have faded to tears. Lise's hair, shades of walnut, hangs down past her shoulders. Now Leo works as a reservations agent for Freewheeling Travel Agency. Lise is a dancer, so in between rehearsals and performances, she teaches dance to girls and boys. She'd like to go places. Leo would like to take her there.

There has to be a river, an Ohio kind of river, down by the banks of which Willie stabs the girl who refuses to marry him, in the song. There has to be a river on which pucks slide in winter, in which mistakes sink in spring, across which animals and people swim and swim and come to rest. The requisite rubber tire will lie on the bottom and we'll just have to believe it's there because we'll never see it ourselves. It is, most assuredly, there. A river less polluted than it was thirty years ago, with a tire that first preceded, and then escaped, the clean-up. A good old river like the Old Man River kind of river, that just keeps rolling along. This river is green and blue and mudbottom brown but for one moment at sunrise when the river is yellow, and for one at sunset when it is red. There are trees by the river, which is very public, if never the same twice, and along which all the people in town sooner or later go walking. There is a handful of private spots: a grove of trees more dense than the others, the cave at the water's edge, the cement ledge shoring up the mudbank under the bridge. Lise and Leo have spent some time in these resort locales. We could meet at one, if you have the time, and peek in on them.

Not the source of the doubt, that's no mystery.

I'd like Leo to be okay, not to have been too badly hurt by what happened to him as a child, but it wouldn't be realistic. If he works three more months at the agency, though, he will be entitled to a ticket of some kind, free.

I've chosen a setting other than San Diego. San Diego is by the ocean, but it has no rivers, only creeks, and they're dry.

Setting the statue in motion.

Why don't you join me on this unseasonably warm February afternoon on a riverbank far from San Diego? Pigeons abound here, clocking from up in the leafless trees, leaving trident tracks amok in the mud. We could spy on Lise and Leo as they go walking in the park. Before he worked at Freewheeling, Leo played the town founder, his clothes spray-painted, and his face made-up in, the silver of statuary. He would stand still on a white plaster pedestal until someone, a spectator or a passerby, put a coin in the box on the ground. Then he would move just enough to smile or wink at that person and freeze again in a new official position. One day, Lise passed by. Since she first saw him there in his painted togs last May, Lise has wanted him wanted him wanted him. For Leo's part, he didn't even need to be wanted before he wanted wanted wanted her. He had already been struck by the approach of a girl who seemed to skate more than walk, whose hair flickered. In fact, she did not pass by him; she circled him, and coming to stand in front of him once more threw into his collection box every coin she had on her person-luckily, less than a dollar in change-one every ten seconds, to try to get him to dance, laughing as she did. They joked about it later. But at the time, Leo's marble skin wrinkled with fear. All he could think to do was jump down, take off his silver wreath, and crown her tree-bark head with it, which broke the remaining ice beautifully.

In a town whose tourism sends people away rather than brings them in, this line of work was not promising. Except that it brought Leo Lise.

Look, just now, Leo leans up against a tree, looking down on the river. Lise walks her right leg in toward his. Lise tells her sap it's not yet spring, but it doesn't believe her-and rises. Leo splays the fingers of Lise's right hand with his own. He offers her his neck, pulse first. Lise admires the grace of her left hand snaking up and over his shoulder. Lise and Leo could pique more than our curiosity, if you see what I mean.

Later, Lise goes to class. She takes a class and she teaches a class. Leo works at Freewheeling, putting together everybody else's travel packages. On the wall by his desk, a handprint in blue paint, Lise's. She gave it to him the day after a night that they woke up holding hands; both of them lay there, unspeaking and unmoving, each afraid to wake the other into an instinctual unlacing. Lise walks back from her classes; the river is for an instant red; night falls; she goes to meet Leo. He smiles when he sees her. He smiles when he enters her too, but right before he comes, his face looks like rage, which is the most exciting part to Lise. Right before Lise comes, she stops breathing; it's right before she doesn't come that her face looks like rage to Leo, which frightens him. Lise tells Leo that her dance company is set to start rehearsals for a new piece, to be premiered in eight weeks and in San Diego, worlds away.

The mystery of which mystery. That mystery.

There is a new guy in Lise's company. He's straight, judging by the existence of his ex-girlfriend, who hangs around rehearsals a lot, as though she doesn't have anything to do. She must be a student. Her ex-boyfriend, the new member of the troupe, has sandy hair and a background in improv. In his free time, he parachutes, as though he has less than nothing to lose, for which the director chastises him. No risks to life and limb is one of the rules of the troupe. The new member laughs a lot. Lise behaves no differently than she ever did. But what does that mean?

In eight weeks, Freewheeling will be in peak season and Leo doesn't need to ask to know that he will not be given time off.

It's instant Shakespeare. Enter the sandy-haired guy-I'll call him Will. Think of the grove and the sap and the youth and the stage on which these players dance and play. Think of the tiptoe and prancing of fairies in the woods, beside which mortals, even dancing ones, look clumsy and wrong, like beached blue whales. Think of the silly games, funny to the fairies, that ruin people's lives.

Lise doesn't speak about Will when she and Leo decide that they don't have enough money to go in on a car together, even though a friend is offering an old one to them for cheap. But they can't afford the new tires it will need, nor the insurance. Lise and Will have a pas de deux that lasts for four minutes and twenty-eight seconds.

I wish I could introduce a device to divert Lise and Leo from their likely courses of action. But the only thing I can think of to save them now is a semaphore, and what does that mean? I've been told not to use words whose meaning might be unclear, but I can't reveal the source of the prohibition.

Lise doesn't mention Will when she and Leo wobble their way out of bumper cars. That's what worries Leo. She doesn't mention Will when Leo goes with her to buy a new duffel bag for her upcoming tour. Lise calls back to Leo in bed, "Watch," as she shows him her half of the duet, her eyes on the bedroom mirror.

She moves like mercury, like she could slide at the speed of silver or split herself into a million little bubbles. How can he hope to hold her? She has already streaked her beautiful brown hair with dubious blonde highlights.

But how too can he stand to watch her climb into the train along with her duffel bag, and Will, and his duffel bag, and the other dancers bound for San Diego?

A week before she is due to leave, Leo begins to panic. How can Will be disappeared, or turned into a toad? How can Leo live in this landlocked town without Lise, even for a few weeks? How can he stand on a platform, desperately trying to avoid the blatant symbolism of Will's ex-girlfriend standing there next to him? How can he stand to see Lise's joy as the train rolls friction-free to the west? It is too much, he cannot.

These are the mysteries Leo faces in April. They sink him even deeper into perplexity than he has been before. Any one of us can slide at any time, with or without the bells and whistles doppling down the track, with or without meaning to. By the same token, we run the risk of being left too abruptly-for example, the way I leave you here and now, wondering whether Leo uses his six remaining days to plot and execute the kind of crime that will keep Lise and Will apart forever, or turns his back on the platform to hurt Lise just a little as she waves out the window, goodbye, goes home to throw his old clothes in his own sort of a suitcase and carries it, in the yellow-rivered dawn of the following day, past the crying whale in the sleeping laundromat, to the bus station, to take his chances east.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from KISSED BYby ALEXANDRA CHASIN Copyright © 2007 by Alexandra Chasin. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573661384
• ISBN 13: 9781573661386
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208